3 Customer Experience Trends to Expect in 2018

Nov 30, 2017

The new year is quickly approaching, and your company is most likely setting goals for 2018.

According to the Harvard Business Review, organizations that are able to skillfully manage the entire experience reap enormous rewards: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction.

Optimizing customer experience should be one main objective for all marketers. In this fast-paced “experience economy”, success is often defined as whether or not you create a useful and enjoyable experience for your customers.

There is always room for improvement when it comes to your company’s customer experience online. Problems with website performance, design, and lack of personalization can easily drive customers away. On the other hand, when businesses are obsessed with providing the best possible customer experience, they thrive.

If your website is up-to-date with great UX design, and creates a positive, value-added experience for customers, you’re on track to close more sales.

In this article, we’ll remind you to prioritize creating high quality customer experiences by keeping the following few points in mind. We recognize that customer experience is a vast subject, but read on for 3 keytakeaways we want to highlight for you.

1) Gen Z Will Have a Powerful Influence

If your company targets a younger demographic, then you’ll be particularly interested in targeting Generation Z.

The group of consumers born 1995-2012, “Gen Z”, are the most tech savvy and demanding group yet.

They’re also more likely to drop a brand, service, or product over poorly designed mobile features or slow response times in customer service online chat than millennials.

As this generation enters their twenties, they are proving their spending power already, and making demands for better user experience and customer service.

According to an AdWeek article this year, Gen Z consumers demand immediacy, personalization, security, and entertainment from their customer experiences.

2) Customer Journeys Will Be Omnichannel & Seamless

Nowadays, consumers bounce between social media platforms and switch between using their smartphones, tablets, and laptops, constantly.

Customers are expecting a seamless transition from one channel to the next, all the while enjoying a consistent, uniform experience interacting with the brand along the way.

Therefore, you need to anticipate many possible starting points in the customer journey. Businesses need to try to be present on as many marketing channels as possible.

Across channels and social platforms, you need to create a unified feel of the content to make it a cohesive customer experience.

Digital marketers need to be forward-thinking, customer-focused, and data-savvy to succeed in 2018.

When you connect the dots along your customer’s journey from prospect to customer, you can tell right away that there is a web of circumstances and marketing channels at play.

Since customers are unique and have their own timelines and desires, it’s counterproductive to try to generalize them together and push them along a linear path to purchase.

3) There Will Be More of an

Emphasis on CIAMs

CIAM (Customer Identity and Access Management) Solutions are likely to be a primary focus of companies that want to stay ahead of the competition. The term “CIAM” will inevitably become more commonly used and understood as people do more and more business online in 2018.

A company’s ability to manage customer data, especially sensitive, personal data, plays a key part in a customer’s experience and trust in a brand. Customers demand privacy management and control of how businesses can use and share their personal information.

Nevertheless, by using robust CIAM practices, companies can provide a 360-degree views of their customers, shedding light on buying behavior and other details about their needs.

As one Forrester report pointed out, businesses need in-depth customer insights to successfully deliver new products and services that can sustain brand loyalty, but at the same time, this requires a more sophisticated approach to data management and security.

Poor digital customer experiences usually result from a negative CIAM experience (think about an inconvenient registration process, vague enrollment terms, and an annoying password reset procedure).

Ultimately, customers expect easy-to-use websites and apps, but the need to protect their data and minimize the risk of fraud needs to be prioritized as well. Companies that can strike a balance between easy usability and high security will win in this area.

In Conclusion…

According to the Harvard Business Review, organizations that are able to skillfully manage the whole customer experience reap enormous rewards: enhanced customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee satisfaction.

If you can make your entire customer journey smoother and more streamlined for yourself and the customer. you’ll be saving time, energy and money in the long run.